Networks connecting many computers offer users access to a wide variety of information. Computers are exceptional devices for storing, sorting and relating large amounts of information. Information is stored on computers and networked computing and storage devices as documents or objects, together referred to as document objects. Such document objects may contain any form of information, from text documents and articles, financial data, statistical information, electronic mail, images and photos, music, animation, and even motion pictures.
The term “computer” or “computing device”, although generally thought of to mean a general purpose digital computing device, may include any one of several different information processing and communications devices including mainframe computers, server computers, minicomputers, personal computers, laptop portable computers, handheld computers, personal digital assistants, intelligent wireless phones, and any other device with a microprocessor and an operating system enabling the device to be connected to a network of other information processing and communications devices.
The Internet, as a network of interconnected networks, offers users access to an even broader collection of information—the Worldwide Web (the “Web”). On the Web, publishers offer information for educational, recreational, commercial and other purposes. The Internet, and its predominant Web form, is organized and accessed by assigning document objects an address, or Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”). These URLs define the transfer protocol for and location of each individual document object on the Internet, or other network, including the Internetworking Protocol (“IP”) address of the host computer system of the document object.
A URL may also represent an address including instructions for accessing a document object that is generated on request by retrieving and rendering for presentation organized information in response to information supplied by the requestor. When the URL contains enough information to recreate the document object generated in such a manner, that document object can be recreated for others using the URL. A URL may also include information, sometimes called a bookmark, with information allowing the rendering tool to present or highlight a location in the document upon opening the document.
Users accessing computer networks and the Internet are generally required to perform their own searches across the networks for the information, stored as document objects, that they desire or need. As the amount of information available on computer networks, and on the Internet in particular, grows exponentially, existing search and information location techniques become increasingly less effective. Existing Internet search techniques often yield too many seemingly related references that are not, in fact, truly useful to the user. The usefulness of traditional Internet search and indexing systems is actually decreasing as the number of documents on the Internet explodes.
Existing search, categorization, and retrieval techniques for document objects stored on computer networks, while generally executed at the high speeds of modern computer systems, are increasingly imprecise and often much too broad, as well as time and labor intensive, owing to the explosion of information being added to those networks.
A need exists to enhance the network user's information search and browsing experience. A need exists to provide network users with information relevant to the individual document object they are accessing and provide that information in a context of value to them by relating the document object they are accessing to link references to other document objects within a specific context. Such other document objects may or may not be offered by the publisher of the document object currently accessed. A need exists to provide network users with information relevant to the specific information the user may be searching for and relevant to the user's immediate personal, professional, geographic and other interests.
A need exists to access information available on the network by accessing relationships between document objects that are relevant to one another. A need further exists to allow alternate techniques for viewing and navigating relationships between document objects that are relevant to one another. A need further exists to provide users with access to these multiple frameworks for management of and access to document objects.
A need further exists to facilitate educated selection of the kinds of relationships that the user is interested in and the document objects in those relationships by presenting the relationships with managing information while viewing document objects on the network.
A need exists for entities or groups to be able to communicate information to their employees or members as those employees or members access document objects on a network, and to enable those employees or members to view content deemed important to the entities or groups. A need further exists for publishers of content on the Internet to be able to personalize content presented to Internet users without requiring the establishment of a personal relationship between the user and the content publisher. A need exists to enable the collection of the search experiences of a group of users and share that experience with other users of networked information devices.
A need exists for a better user interface. A need exists for better search methods.
These needs reflect a broader need to reduce the time and effort involved, and to provide increased user satisfaction, in user searches for relevant document objects on a network.
Furthermore, a need exists to present a user accessing document objects on the network with a view of a document object the user is accessing, and document objects related to that document object, within a framework for management and presentation developed by the user and by other users of the network.
Wireless communication and information processing devices present unique challenges to the user in finding document objects offered on the network to which the device is wirelessly connected. Some of the challenges include one or more of the following.
On some wireless networks, the speed of the data transfer is limited by the communications network, the devices, the proximity of the device to a network interface and the activity load on that network. The upload of a request for information and the download of a response can be perceived as being very long. A need exists to assist the user with navigation and selection of document objects to minimize the number of times they “click through” document objects that are presented to the user without enough context to ascertain the document objects' value before the user selects the document object for download.
Distribution of document objects to users of wireless devices, aside from being technically challenging because of the format and the competing and evolving protocol challenges of the wireless networks and devices, can be limited based on the portal and application service relationships of the communication services provider or the service provider's network. Those organizations that are developing applications and infrastructure that provide services endeavor to structure and protect their channel to these users and to develop payment-for-placement distribution. A need exists to provide improved method for distribution of content to users of handheld devices.
In addition, the display screens on handheld devices currently remain very small in order to reduce weight and size of the devices. The screens are much smaller than stationary information processing devices, thus permitting very limited viewing areas. Therefore, a limited amount of information can be presented to a user of such a device at any one time without scrolling through multiple screens of data. The context of the information displayed can be lost without the whole picture offered in the large screen typical of a stationary information processing device. Users of such devices prefer presentation of shorter lists and shorter document objects. A need exists to provide access to a greater breadth of alternative selections while viewing content condensed for smaller presentation of handheld devices.
Wireless device users may use their devices to perform indirect search functions. These indirect search functions include search experiences where the user is looking for information based on their current instance. For example, a user may be viewing in their wireless device a document object containing news about a disaster in a region of the world. The user's interest in the news may be related to an investment in a company in that part of the world. The user's indirect search of the impact of the disaster on their investment requires the initial context of the disaster. A successful indirect search allows the user to find the impact on their investment related to the context of the disaster. A need exists to allow users to navigate and access document objects using complex relationships between document objects based on the context of their current search instance. A need further exists to narrow a search for document objects without excluding related document objects based on methods of narrowing a search.
Data entry may be limited depending on the type of device. Handheld information processing and communications devices may use handwriting recognition, miniaturized or portable QWERTY keyboards, or numeric keypads with extra function buttons. Entry of text using these devices can be difficult. A need exists to improve navigation of distributed information by facilitating selection and reducing entry of search query attributes.